


days of future passed

by deepandlovelydark



Category: Babylon 5
Genre: Comedy, Fish out of Water, OR IS IT, POV Outsider, Slice of Life, Space is Beautiful, Spoilers for Episode: s03e10 Severed Dreams, Time Travel, and also dangerous
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-08 04:00:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15922445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: there's hustles, and then there's landing up in command of a twenty-third century starship, just because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.it's not the lies that worry Major Ed Ryan. Or that people expect him to act like a hero.it's that he might wake up one morning and find he actually is one





	1. days of future passed

**Author's Note:**

> in which Major Ryan gets a thoroughly overcomplicated backstory, based around his actor having played a delightful con man/pilot on MacGyver. So mostly an excuse for me to play around with an outsider's perspective on Babylon 5, the War, and what precisely General Hague thought he was doing while the Babylon dream team was gearing up for action. 
> 
> (Please note that I'm up to "Interludes and Examinations" and I've no idea what happens next, so I'd really rather not have any spoilers. Progress on the fic might therefore be informed by marathoning sessions and whether any of my assumptions turn out to be hilariously wrong. Thanks lots.)
> 
> abandoned. Love the fandom, writing fic just doesn't work.

"An Abyssinian cat named Max."

Sheer, unmitigated bluff: erverything he knows about the _Clarkstown_ , he got out of an intelligence file. To his trained ear, the story doesn't even sound very convincing. Delivery too flat, unsympathetic, and above all, scared stiff. 

But it's an old hustler's trick, to flaunt the weakest part of the story as a final clinching proof. The thought that's bound to occur to the crew and officers, now the fighting's stopped long enough for them to breathe, is just how much their new commander is an unknown quantity. A nobody. General Hague's mysterious aide, with no background whatsoever. 

So he makes a point of talking about shared connections, the lamentable costs of fighting against one’s own people. Maybe he’s not fighting a civil war, but they sure are, and the officers accept his lies with thirsty guilt. Or they accept the uniform, at least. Damned thing’s hot as hell and twice as uncomfortable, but he’s more grateful than ever now for how much people look at it rather than him. 

"What's our course?" Bill asks. Respectfully enough. 

Home, he'd like to say. Where none of them can go anymore. 

Though it's a little farther away for him than anybody else. Home is the twentieth century, a past with no aliens and no telepaths. Where space travel’s still the dream everybody figures will bring utopia. Where people can afford to laugh about deep deadly evils from the dawn of time. Where a scruffy pilot running a simple LAX-IAH milk run intercepted a UFO en route, and landed up a century and a half off-schedule and out of date. 

"We need time to make repairs, catch our breath. There's only one place safe for us. Set course for Babylon 5."

The dirty little secret about space operas, he’s discovered, is that nobody needs a captain to keep a starship going. Half-wrecked and distraught as they are, the people in this service will keep striving for as long there's a deck to hold them. What they need him to do is to listen. Listen; and make the decisions that’ll absolve them, let them carry on with their work without having to take that last terrifying step of absolute responsibility.

He owes it to Hague, to do that much for them. 

“You ever been to the station before, sir?” Bill asks later, once they've hit hyperspace. (Amazing how fast watching that got dull. Just another highway, only it's impossible to tell which is the wrong side of the road. Or he can't, at least. But that's what techs are for.)

“Sure. Couple times- it's a beautiful place. All that blue and grey rotating away in the night, you almost get to believing in peace at a place like that.”

The homesickness kicks in hard then, worse than he can remember since the first few weeks of time-shifted shock; but it's not for Earth or the past at all, this time. The first place he landed up, half his life in this century, he's spent at that haven for hustlers and wanderers. The thought of getting back there for a little while is paradoxically soothing and rousing at once. 

"Too bad about us coming in to spoil it." Bill says. 

"True enough," Ryan agrees. 

(Which is not his real name. Not even close. But that'll keep.)


	2. one year earlier, give or take a bit

_ this ship’s the most beautiful thing I've ever seen _

There are ripples in the mottled, elegant surface, as though she lives and breathes. The lines on her are like nothing he’s ever seen before; smooth, simple, with perfect idealised curves. The civilian’s idea of aerodynamic, as opposed to what would actually fly- but that wouldn’t matter in space, would it? And he’s definitely in space. 

It’s a helpful thing, to have this ship to focus on while he’s panicking. Trying to shake off the effects of an incredibly deep sleep, thumping his hands against the floor- there's no sign of bonds, but everything's numb. As though he slept on his entire body wrong.  It takes a few minutes before sensation starts returning, and a few more before the pins and needles have stopped pinching long enough for him to try sitting up. 

It's a hanger. Grey, utilitarian, well-swept. He knows what hangers are, he's seen enough of them. Just this one has a sweet-jesus-you're-gorgeous spaceship in it instead of a plane, that's all. 

"Okay, Jack, stop getting distracted," he says aloud. "Hullo? Anybody here?"

The ship rests in front of him, bobbing a little bit up and down- is it bobbing?  

Irresistibly curious, he reaches out a hand, tries to touch the thing- and gets blasted all the way to the opposite wall for his pains. Everything hurts again except his right arm, which has returned to a suspiciously-familiar shade of numbness. He gives it rather longer this time before venturing up again. 

Somebody brought him here. Somebody took him out of that ship, somebody left him on the floor to regain consciousness all on his lonesome. Not very hospitable of them. 

"Y'know, if there's nobody here, I guess I might as well leave...you know? Seeing how it's silly talking to myself and all? Go and have fun exploring this place, whatever it is."

When the change comes, he has no idea. One second he'd swear he's alone, the next, he's confronting a tall thing that looks like a shower curtain eating a plastics factory. Looks silly. 

"You will return."

Looks silly, maybe: not so the voice. The voice sears his hearing with uncanny familiarity, the voice hits him on levels he didn't even know he had, singing in the wrong key. Like the rasp of a stalling engine, in the three seconds between "uh-oh" and "welp, here comes another chance to practice powerless landings". Well-honed instinct starts him moving before he even has time to think, to question, to stand on his dignity and demand the what and who and why of it all. 

Dignity's not really his forte, anyway. Running away from things is. 

(A couple months later, he calculates things and figures he must have set some sort of record for an unassisted speed-run of Blue Sector.

Too bad the only person who could have verified it is a Vorlon.)

**********

Roses. Bright red roses, damp petals shining in the light. 

Back home (and how far's that?), he'd once dated a girl who liked spouting off high-falutin' literary references, but only ever in bed. Random little snippets and taglines, nothing that'd ever be of any use to a laidback smuggler, but he'd remembered some of it anyway. Small details have a way of being lifesavers in his profession.  

(Also, the quicker he caught on what she was on about, the better the sex, which was an awfully strong incentive.)

"Empty signifiers," he says to the bouquet. They smell real, they look real, no different from the kind he'd bought for his squeeze and plenty others like her. "Or something like that. So many meanings, it stops meaning anything at all."

His heart's still skipping frantically, and he can't stop gasping for breath. Five feet away from him, there's two-  _things_ , clicking at a bundle of things that click right back at them. Perhaps to them the roses are still flowers; perhaps they're food, perhaps they're contact poison or religious relics, how's he supposed to know? All of his assumptions are useless. There are these things which look like roses, in his hands, and all that tells him is that this place has things that look like roses.

Hyperventilating suddenly seems like a perfectly good notion. Suppose they take away the oxygen next?

“Hey. You can’t sit there, it's bad for business.”

“Sorry.”

Mouth dry, he gets up and puts back the things-which-may-not-be-roses. Adjusts his stride to match the busy pace of traffic (people are much less likely to question someone who looks like they know where they’re going). Takes a few minutes, to realise he’d just had a conversation in English. Actual English, not some weird peekaboo alien language or whatever. 

“Okay,” he mutters to himself. “Great. Now we’re getting somewhere- hang on, are you an empty signifier too?"

He doesn't think so; what this one looks like is a cop. Has the uniform, has the attitude. A casual mock-threat to arrest somebody, if they don’t quit what they’re doing and move along- and his hot, abrupt rush of understanding is deliriously joyful.  Not because he intends to ask for help. Hell no. For all he knows, that weird curtain rod affair has the authorities all sewn up, and he’s not about to risk getting recaptured. 

But the existence of a cop implies _criminals._

People who hustle and lie and scape out an existence on the fringes, his kind of people, who’ll forge identity cards if they're needed and hide you away for the right price. It implies a society that works in ways he's capable of comprehending. Maybe there’s a place for him in this shiny happy future after all.

Weak with relief, catching his breath at last, he lets the tide of people sweep him along for a while. Stops at another booth, manned by a tired-looking woman who skewers suspicious-looking lumps from a vat of cooking oil. Smells just like home. 

“Say, uh- is that all right for humans to eat?”

“Sure. You want a sample?”

It’s weird. The taste’s like cotton candy, but with a vinegar afterburn that’s almost too much for him to handle. She watches him with amusement as he chokes and recovers his composure. 

“Hit me that way the first time, too,” she says, not without compassion. “So what brings you to Babylon 5?”

“Oh, the usual, final frontier and all that. But I got all my luggage swiped on the last jaunt- look. Where do people go if they land up here, and they’re flat broke?”

She looks dubious. “Well, there’s always Down Below- but you don’t want to end up there, trust me.”

Skid Row. The East Village, Whitechapel- there’s a place like this in every city. Even out in space, apparently. 

“Sounds like my kinda stopping place. And one other thing- you know anybody who might be in the market for antique Earth leather? Like this jacket I’m wearing.”

He can’t believe he’s doing this. The flight jacket’s an heirloom, his most treasured possession. The only treasured possession he's got left, come to think of it. Selling it off for flophouse dosh and a few square meals is a bargain that’ll come back to haunt him. But not till later- and  what matters now is now.

“Maybe I would,” the woman says, looking him up and down with interest. Empty signifiers again-  is this a threat or a flirtation, or something else entirely?

"And beautiful things for beautiful people, am I right?" He pulls out a single, dark crimson rose. Snaps the stem short and tucks it gently into her breast pocket, where it nestles fragrantly against her plain, oil-stained clothing. 

"That's the corniest line I've heard all week- and believe me, I hear enough of them." She fingers the soft petals. "Real synthetic, huh? You're a cheeky bastard and no mistake."

"Always," he agrees, with meek self-deprecation. She throws back her head and laughs. 

He knows it's going to be okay, then. 

After all. Any universe that still has humour in it can't be so alien as all that. 


End file.
